Lauren Groff Quotes

Life was rich with possibility, or life was possibly rich...She felt incandescent with the news.
Cold sun. Jack in the pulpits nosing out of the still-frozen mud. Lotto lay watching the world incrementally wake up. They had been married for seventeen years, she lived in the deepest room in his heart, and sometimes that meant that wife occurred to him before Mathilde, helpmeet before herself, abstraction of her before the physical being.
But not now. When she came across the veranda, he saw Mathilde all of the sudden, the dark whip at the center of her, how, so gently, she flicked it and kept him spinning. She put her cold hand on his stomach, which he was sunning to banish the winter's white. 'Vain,' she said.
'An actor in a playwright's hide,' he said. 'I'll never not be vain.'
'Oh well, it's you,' she said. 'You're desperate for the love of strangers, to be seen.'
'You see me,' he said. And he heard the echo with his thoughts a minute before and was pleased.
'I do,' she said. 'Now please, talk.'
She stretched her arms over heads...she looked at him, savoring her own knowing, his unknowing...

The strong wind rises against the trees so they bend like girls washing their hair.

You had to pick up a landline to make sure your best friend wore a matching outfit to school. I do remember people talking more. Nostalgia is dangerous, though.

I love that he's both comic and tragic, and highly poetic but also just dirty at times ... I love that within the world of Shakespeare's plays, the whole world is sort of encompassed in a certain way.

The beige linoleum floor turned into the ocean, crashed and crashed against Lotto's shins. He sat down. How swiftly things spun. Two minutes ago he'd been a kid, thinking about his nintendo system, worried about asymptotes and signs. Now he was, heavy, adult.

Privilege is what lets you take risks.

The balls it took to proclaim a creative profession, the narcissism.

He'd been dazzled by the luck; she smiled, knowing that luck was not real. The

In my totally unscientific yet enthusiastic survey of Communal Experiments Throughout American History, I've discovered that the thing most likely to break up said experiments is: Sex, all that murky, dark, dirty gunk simmering beneath human relations.

Look, now, in the distance, a person, closer, it's two people, hand in hand, ankle deep in the froth. Sunrise in hair, blonde, green bikini, tall, shining. They kiss. Handsy things happening underneath hist trunks, her tongue.
Who wouldn't envy such youth, who wouldn't grieve what has been lost in watching. They come up the dune, she pushing him backward, up.
Study them from the balcony, holding your breath while the couple stops in a smooth bowl of sand, protected by the dunes. She pushes down his trunks, he takes off her bathing suit, top and bottom. Oh yes, you would return to your wife on hands and knees, crawl the distance of the eastern seaboard to feel her fingers once more in your hair.
You are unworthy of her. Yes. No.
Even as you think of flight, you're transfixed by the lovers, wouldn't dare move for fear of making them flap like birds into the blistered sky.
They step into each other, and it's hard to tell where one begins and one ends. Hands in hair and warmth on warmth, into the sand her red knees raised, his body moving.
It is time. Something odd happening though you are not ready for it. There is an overlap. You have seen this before, felt her breath on your nape, the heat of her beneath, and the cold damp of day on your back, the helpless overwhelm, a sense of crossing. The sex reaching it's culmination.
Come. Lip bitten to blood and finish with a roar and birds shoot up and crumbles in the pink folds of an ear. Serrat

Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.

His only extravagance was soccer, though he called it football, of course, rooted for Tottenham. His mother, you see, was Jewish; she loved how Tottenham fought back against anti-Semitic slurs and called themselves the Yid Army. The Yiddos. For Leo, he said, it had also been the name, so meaty, so metrical. Tottenham Hotspur, its own tiny song.

WIDOW. The word consumes itself, said Sylvia Plath, who consumed herself.

Research is about following the gleam into the dark. It's also about being sensitive enough to know which fact is "the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders," as opposed to the fact that deadens and kills a delicate new project.

Why has nobody ever told him that the man in the moon is shouting in alarm? He

Already he loved the laugh she held in her,

When I was small and easily wounded books were my carapace. If I were recalled to my hurts in the middle of a book they somehow mattered less. My corporeal life was slight the dazzling one in my head was what really mattered. Returning to books was coming home.

In the height of her happiness many years later, she would think of that solitary little girl, face downturned like a demure fucking bellflower, while inside there was the maelstrom. She'd want to smack that kid hard. Or pick her up in her arms and cover her eyes and run somewhere safe with her.

Time would not care if you fell out of it. It would continue on without you. It cannot see you; it has always been blind to the human and the things we do to stave it off, the taxonomies, the cleaning, the arranging, the ordering.

Sex is a good starting point for everything.

But it's not just me, you know. The whole world's sad," I said. "It's like a virus. It's going to end badly. Glaciers melting, ozone depleted. Terrorists blowing up buildings, nuclear rods infecting the aqueducts. Influenza hopping from the pigeons to the humans, killing millions. Billions. People rotting in the street. The sun bursting open, shattering us eight minutes later. If not that, starvation. Cannibalism. Freakish mutated babies with eyeballs in their navels. It's a terrible place to bring a child into," I said. "This world. It is terrible. Just terrible." I

I love you beyond love.'
'Me too,' she said.

A feminist is just someone who recognizes power structures that keep people from having the fullest life they can.

There is no ending, no neatness ... where water is concerned. It is wild, febrile, kind, ambiguous; it is dark and carries the mud, and it is clear and the cleanest thing. Too much of it kills us, and not enough kills us, and it is what makes us, mostly. Water is the cleverest substance, wily beyond the stretch of our mortal imaginations. And no matter where it is pent, no matter if it is air or liquid or solid, it will someday, inevitably, find its way out.

You're the interesting one." It

We've been reckless with our gifts." He

The ground heaved, and then, because the air was bright and the birds were

I loved books like people; I liked real people less.

...he knows stories don't need to be factual to be vital.

She rode at the head of a shining line of black limos like the head raven in a convocation of black birds. Her husband had moved people, and, in so moving, had become their Lancelot Satterwhite, too. Something of him lived in them, was not hers, was now theirs.

Perhaps living in fear can drive all devils out of a person.

Sick, my brothers are sending me home. This place infects me. Templeton my smooth little pill ... such images I have. Such voices, that high voice, the little girl's so naughty, talking to me, all the time now. How I hate her ... the train is empty, Albany a small, spangled fish ... this train is all brown velvet ... the train slows, I am in Templeton, oh. Templeton, Templeton, the train says, slowing down. The lake, the blue, is an embrace.

She'd always hated pregnant ladies. The original Trojan horses, they. Horrible

The story we are told of women is not this one. The story of women is the story of love, of foundering into another. A slight deviation: longing to founder and being unable to. Being left alone in the foundering, and taking things into one's own hands: rat poison, the wheels of a Russian train. Even the smoother and gentler story is still just a modified version of the above. In the demotic, in the key of bougie, it's the promise of love in old age for all the good girls of the world.

Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said.

How swift, the slippage from keeping it together to losing it.

He got drunk as usual, but instead of drifting to sleep, he stayed up, and at a white heat, wrote what had been sitting on his heart for decades.

Unplug from the humble needs of the body and a person becomes no more than a ghost.

These silent intimacies made their marriage, not the ceremonies or parties or opening nights or occasions or spectacular fucks.

The gods love to fuck with us.

The Buddha laughed in silence from the mantelpiece.

From a mile away, the sound. The sirens.

I'm fine. I'm fine, he says, and fine, fine, repeats in his head as he escapes back into the chill. Around him, a spin of bodies in dark coats, tapping thumbs on pads, pressing phones to heads, settling buds into ear canals, projecting an invisible shield of music as they move through the crowd, digital companionship warmer than the bodies around them. Every soul on the street is sunk within its body. Sometimes Bit imagines that he, alone, bears witness to the world.

They sit here in the darkness, trusting. That the coffee will be hot and unpoisoned. That no raging madman will come in with a gun or bomb.

It leaves him breathless at times, how much faith people put in one another. So fragile, the social contract: we will all stand by the rules, move with care and gentleness, invest in the infrastructure, agree with the penalties of failure. That this man driving his truck down the street won't, on a whim, angle into the plate glass and end things. That the president won't let his hand hover over the red button and, in moment of rage or weakness, explode the world. The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It's a miracle that it exists at all.

It's marvelous to know another person's entire literary canon by heart. It's like knowing their secret personal language.

The stories themselves aren't what moves him now ... What moves him are the shadowy people behind the stories, the workers weary from their days, gathering at night in front of a comforting bit of fire ... The world then was no less terrifying than it is now, with our nightmares of bombs and disease and technological warfare. Anything held the ability to set of fear ... a nail dropped in a the hay, wolves circling at the edge of the woods ...

I am a person beset with fears, and one of my fears is that this thing that I will be writing for five years won't work. And the likelihood, of course, is that it won't - and that's fine.

But please, Mathilde knew lions. The male lolled beautifully, lazy in the sun. The female, less lovely by miles, was the one who brought back the kill.

A QUESTION OF VISION. From the sun's seat, after all, humanity is an abstraction.

It was somehow clear, even then, that the monster had been lonely. The folds above its eye made the old face look wistful, and it emanated such a strong sense of solitude that each human standing in the park that day felt miles from the others, though we were shoulder-to-shoulder, touching.

strange, spiky pieces of

A FASCINATING PBS SPECIAL on black holes: the suck and draw so strong it can gulp down light.

God, says Handy, or the Eternal Spark, is in every human heart, in every piece of this earth. In this rock, in this ice, in this plant, this bird. All deserve our gentleness. The

They handed over spider plants in terra-cotta, six-packs, books, bottles of wine. Yuppies in embryo, miming their parents' manners.

Even when you think you can't bear it, you can bear it.

Sometimes immense things, like war and death and aging, are best seen from the corner of the eye and written of only obliquely, with tremendous lightness.

Lugubrious and pretentious at the same time.

A stranger hurrying as fast as he could over the icy sidewalks looked in. He saw a circle of singing people bathed in the clean white light from a tree, and his heart did a somersault, and the image stayed with him; it merged with him even as he came home to his own children, who were already sleeping in their beds, to his wife crossly putting together the tricycle without the screwdriver that he'd run out to borrow. It remained long after his children ripped open their gifts and abandoned their toys in puddles of paper and grew too old for them and left their house and parents and childhoods, so that he and his wife gaped at each other in bewilderment as to how it had happened so terribly swiftly. All those years, the singers in the soft light in the basement apartment crystallized in his mind, became the very idea of what happiness should look like.

YOU'RE A PATHOLOGICAL TRUTH-TELLER, Lotto once said to her, and she laughed and conceded that she was. She wasn't sure just then if she was telling the truth or if she was lying.

The darkest period of my life, so far, arrived the summer I was pregnant with my eldest son. The future was growing in me with all of its terrifying unpredictability, and I found myself anxious, unable to work and woefully at sea.

All of our futures," she said, "exist in the Internet.

Lotto couldn't forget his wife, but she existed on a constant, unchanging plane, her rhythms in his bones. At all moments, he could predict where she was. [Now, whipping eggs for an omelet; now, hiking over the crispy fields to the pond for an illicit smoke as she always did in her angry moments.] And Lancelot existed, right now, on a plane where everything he knew and was had been turned inside out, predictability had exploded. He

Women in narratives were always defined by their relations.

He will miss this quiet full of noise: the nighthawks, the way the woods breathe, the things moving unsuspected through the dark. But he will take with him the canisters full of blasted images and have the pleasure of living them again. They are not nothing, the memories.

A lot of my work comes from a place of despair or fear. I often write in order to gain some sort of control over aspects of my life or the world that seem too dark to look at directly.

This peaceful sleep of being born male and rich and white and American and at this prosperous time, when the wars that were happening were far from home. This boy, told from the first moment he was born that he could do what he wanted. All he needed was to try. Mess up over and over, and everyone would wait until he got it right.

It would never have ended that way. [True. It was not his time.]

Happiness feeds but doesn't nourish.

Time is the currency - the highest valued currency we have now. And people giving you their time is so incredible. They don't have to like your book, either. That's a totally separate gift.

Struggle forms character

What was grief but an extended tantrum to be salved by sex and candy.

From the sun's seat, after all, humanity is an abstraction. Earth a mere spinning blip.

freezing force of the wind. When the blades

I never lie, Mrs. Dutton. I'm a pathological truth-teller.

As with most of my work, I started from the abstract, from research, building an intellectual model that slowly became internalized when the characters came alive. It's fascinating what happens to the model you've so assiduously assembled when characters are allowed to run rampant: things you thought essential are broken and other things are vastly improved.

Fiction is always a utopian task, in that there's an ideal you hold in your head as you write which inevitably fails in the moment of creation, in the insufficiency of words to convey meaning, or in the way the work is completed in the reader's head.

Your life seems simple,' Lancelot said.
Leo Sen said, 'My life is beautiful.'
Lancelot saw that it was. He was enough of a lover of forms to understand the allure of such a strict life, how much internal wildness it could release. Leo waking to dawn over the cold seabird ocean, the fresh berries and goat-milk yogurt for breakfast, the tisanes of his own herbs, blue crabs in the black tide pools, going to bed with the whipping winds and rhythm of waves against hard rock. Lettuce shoots glowing in the south-facing windows. The celibacy, the temperate, moderate life that Leo lived, at least on the outside, in his state of constant cold. And the feverish musical life within.

Of all the places in the world, she belongs in Florida. How dispiriting to learn this of herself.

Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.

It was the people, the interconnection, everyone relying on everyone else, the closeness. The villages are all dying now, small-town America is dying, and the only place where the same feeling exists now is here, in the city, millions of people all breathing the same air. This, here, now, is more utopia than utopia, more than your pretty little house out in the middle of the forest with only woodchucks for neighbors. Can't you see? All of we kids are here, almost all of the kids from Arcadia, are here in the city. We've gone urban because we're all looking for what we lost. This is the only place that approximates it. The closeness. The connection.

Oh, for the god of love, where did time go? [Clockwise swirl going nowhere.]

And the great Now What stretching without end.

He thinks of the rotten parachute they played with as kids in Arcadia: they hurtle through life aging unimaginably fast, but each grasps a silken edge of memory that billows between them and softens the long fall.

He was enough of a lover of forms to understand the allure of such a strict life, how much internal wildness it could release.

I want to eat your life

In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.

Girl scrubs your toilets for twenty-three years, you begrudge her the life she had when you weren't around.

How disappointing, when people succumb to what is expected of them.

A love one week tender, and the world was made bright with him.

The novella is at once the most elegant and demanding form: a writer must balance the looseness of a novel with the concision of a short story, a feat that only the bravest and most talented of us can manage. In Brazil, Jesse Lee Kercheval proves, yet again, that she is exactly the right writer for the job. A wild American picaresque, Brazil snaps along briskly, yet feels full-fleshed, and brims with a sly wit and grace.

Oh, middle age, how awful. He was used to having to look for his lost beauty in his face, but not in his body that had been so tall and strong all his life.

It felt as if they'd crossed a bridge a second before it collapsed.

Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks.

And what hurts him most is the gleam of peace he'd had: he would rather imagine his wife tortured in a secret cell than imagine that she chose to not love them anymore.

Poetry is what he turns to these days, finding in its fragmentation the proper echo of the disintegrating world.

Song: Heloise and Abelard by Elizabeth Devlin. Beyond the a propros subject matter, this lady can really play the Autoharp. This song sounds like something you'd find on a gramophone record.

It was as if the tide of him had been ebbing from her, but she knew, like a real tide, time would bring him back.

There was something just, I don't know, unconvincing about him.

It moved him to know that for her he was everything. He wouldn't ask for more than she'd willingly give.

It's not easy to make friends when you're an adult writer outside of academia, especially when you work alone in a little room for twelve hours a day, and so I wrote toward what I most longed for.